Hippie Kitchen is set clearly in the new model of kitchen companion cookbooks. Rather than a compendium of paint-by-numbers recipes it offers inspiration, enthusiasm, and tips.

That's because we're increasingly going to the internet for dinner recipes. So now, instead of cookbooks filled with recipe after recipe, we want cooking books, friendly kitchen companions, that will entice us back into our kitchens.

"We'd probably cook more," says author and food historian Jean Johnson, "if it wasn't a paint-by-numbers exercise. And why should the elite cooking authorities get to have all the fun? This is simple everyday food. The same delicious food women around the world have been making for centuries-food that's light years beyond brown rice. And it's easy. You start with an idea and pretty soon you're rocking & rolling."

Laced with rock & roll lyrics, Hippie Kitchen: A Measurefree Vegetarian Cookbook is the second title in Johnson's measurefree cookbook trilogy. The first book, Cooking Beyond Measure: How to Eat Well without Formal Recipes came out in 2008.

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About the Author:

Portland, Oregon's Jean Johnson is a historian turned cookbook writer. After the Sixties, Johnson spent 10 years within the Southwest's Hopi and Navajo reservations. She questions the measured approach to cooking adopted by Americans in the 1890s. Michael Pollan may center his critique on Big Food, but Ms. Johnson targets Big Cooking as the real wolf in the hen house.